


interrupted transmissions

by foxbones



Series: yr fave is femslash [2]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: College AU, F/F, fox can be a girl's name too, oops now my favorite pairing of all time is femslash oops, reupload
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-11-10 16:06:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11130162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxbones/pseuds/foxbones
Summary: "One could say there are merits to being undisturbed.” Scully uses this opportunity to give Mulder a meaningful look, though it must be completely lost on her because she closes the gap between them, continuing her ever-constant war on Scully’s personal space. Mulder has a toothpick hanging out the side of her mouth. She always seems to be gnawing on something and for some inhuman reason, it manages to make her attractive. Somehow. Scully has chosen to not spend much time thinking about how or why this works.“Do I disturb you, Scully?”Scully shoots Mulder a look over her shoulder, but since it’s the end of their junior year and they’re this close to finals and she’s really, really used to her shit by now, she just smiles and narrows her eyes. “Maybe.”or, the one where fox mulder is a girl's name and they are in college because x-files college au needed more femslash.





	interrupted transmissions

 

 

 

 

Scully never had a snowball’s chance in heck, really.

Especially not when Mulder is always shoving her face into her carrel, waggling her oversized eyebrows and stage-whispering _Are you blogging again, Scully?_

Scully slams her laptop shut, pretending that she was not, in fact, in the middle of updating her blog. “You smell like...salsa.”

“Top secret investigation at Billy’s Burrito Truck. What is in the enchilada sauce? We cannot be sure. Is it of earthly origins? Unlikely.” Trust Mulder to unceremoniously drop a bag of burrito onto Scully’s desk, narrowly missing her lab reports. “The number three. Extra pork, extra queso fresco. You can thank me later.”

“What do you want?”

“Can’t a gal buy another gal a burrito without there being a motive?” Mulder is shrugging, her face the picture of poorly feigned innocence. Sometimes she looks like an idiot in those button-ups, especially when her glasses have slid all the way down her nose and really, who wears their father’s eyeglasses from 1993 or whatever?

“There’s always a motive with you, Mulder.”

“For a pre-med student, you are very dramatic. Are you sure you’re not in the theatre department?”

At this point, it’s always best to roll one’s eyes and return to your work, but Scully has learned to know better with Mulder. Chiefly, that an ignored Mulder is an increasingly more impassioned Mulder. The girl just does not give up.

“Fine. What is it tonight?”

“Scully,” Mulder says, her voice lowering to that familiar tone of conspiracy, complete seriousness, and possible arousal. “How much do you know about the Goatman?”

And Dana Scully knows that she is tied to this lanky burrito-eating creature forever, because for absolutely no one else on the planet would she ever put down her work, don an ill-fitting rain poncho, and proceed into torrential rain to stalk what Mulder believes is a Goatman.

For Mulder, she would. She does.

 

 

 

 

But because Scully is, if anything, a stickler for method, she will start at the beginning:

 

 

 

 

The first time Scully meets Mulder is in a particularly dull anatomy course. Dana Scully is there to get her A, fill her requirement, and get out, but by the first session, she can tell this is not going to be the case. This is signaled by Professor Blevins’ roll call being interrupted by some hipster asshole in the front row, raising her hand and attempting to alter his list.

“‘Mulder, Felicity’?” he asks, already looking done with the situation.

“Fox,” the girl insists, and Scully can see from here that she’s wearing some baggy thrift store sweater and ridiculous glasses and Leonardo DiCaprio’s haircut from 1996. _Of course._ “I go by Fox.”

“And my wife likes to call me Scotty-Scott, Miss Mulder, but this is academia. If we all went by our nicknames, it wouldn’t be a particularly professional setting, would it?”

“It’s not my nickname.” So naturally, this kid has the audacity to argue with him about it. “It’s my _name_ , it’s Fox. Felicity is my middle name.”

“Her name’s Spooky!” This from one of the frat boys in the back row, prompting the Mulder girl to turn around and flip him off.

“Why don’t you go suck the cheese out of your dick, Krycek?”

He gestures to his crotch. “Why don’t you help?”

At the front of the classroom, Professor Blevins is already turning his back to them. “Retirement, Blevins,” he is saying to himself, starting the first diagram on the board. “You can do it, Blevins.”

 

 

 

 

So it just figures that when it comes to assigning partners for the semester, Dana Scully discovers that she’s ended up with the Mulder girl. And it figures that on the sheet Blevins hands her, someone has crossed out the name Felicity and forcibly scribbled _FOX_ in bright red uppercase letters.

 

 

 

 

“If we’re going to make this whole partners thing work, we’re going to need to set some ground rules.”

Scully has already laid out her color coded notes for the class, and the Mulder girl has produced a mess of crumpled paper, some of it appearing to contain coursework, some of it stuck together with an unidentifiable green substance.

“Are you anal retentive or something?”

“I’ve looked over the syllabus, and I’ve spoken with some students who took the class last semester. I think that an A will require some guidelines for how we work as partners, since so much of our final grade will be dependent on group projects.”

“Anal retentive it is, then.” Mulder pulls on the collar of her flannel shirt, too big for her and questionably stained and boasting a pocket full of pens. Scully’s not sure what this girl needs so many pens for when she can’t be bothered to keep notes, apparently.

Scully doesn’t want to open this can of worms, but she might as well ask. “Are you particularly invested in this class?”

Mulder seems engrossed in something on her phone, gasps dramatically, and then shows Scully her screen. “What do you think that is?”

The screen shows a blurry dark thing on a blurry dark background. Scully blinks.

“That could literally be anything.”

“ _Or,_ ” and Mulder’s thick eyebrows are waggling in an uncomfortable way. “It could be the unquestionable proof needed to debunk the conspiracy at the very tip top of this university’s shadow government.”

“You’re joking.”

Mulder looks slightly insulted. “You know, you’re really fucking uptight for a grunge girl.”

Now it’s Scully’s turn to be insulted. “I’m not _grunge_.”

“Oh excuse me, _soft grunge_. Sorry if I can’t keep up with whatever your Tumblr theme is.” Mulder gestures vaguely at Scully’s outfit. “Plaid and combat boots, a few extra piercings. What exactly is that plus your undercut supposed to signify?”

“Punk, obviously.”

“Punk?” Mulder actually snorts. “Dude, that’s not punk.”

“Right, like you look so original. Shopping at the Salvation Army because you resent all the Nautica your father wears. Doing normcore on purpose, how cute.”

“I stole this shirt from my ex, actually.”

“I bet it didn’t fit him, either.”

“No, as a matter of fact, _she_ wore it as a dress.”

Scully’s not sure why that particular bit of information makes her feel a little nervous, but she rolls her eyes and closes her binder. “I can see this is going to be a problem. I’m going to Professor Blevins this afternoon and I’ll request a change in partners. That’s probably best for the both of us.”

Mulder is slumped down in her seat, avoiding eye contact by staring at a pencil in her hands. She grunts, and swings the thing toward the ceiling, where it sticks, point first. Scully sighs.

“That’s actually pretty impressive.”

Mulder has a chewed pencil nub out the corner of her mouth, and she grins triumphantly. “I know.”

 

 

 

 

And then Mulder is standing outside of Professor Blevins’ office after lunch, smiling in a completely-normal-person-way when she sees Scully approaching. Scully pulls her headphones out as Mulder starts waving.

“Hey, good, you’re here.”

Scully is thoroughly confused, partly by the girl’s presence, partly by the width and brightness of her smile. “Did you already talk to him about switching partners?”

“Nah, I’ve been thinking, and I have a better idea. Let’s keep things the way they are.”

“So now you want us to stay partners for the semester? You’re trying to tell me you’ve had a complete turnaround since an hour ago.”

“Scully, have you ever met someone and known for certain that they are the exact person you need for that campaign of truth-seeking you’ve been pursuing since you were a freshman?”

Scully raises an eyebrow, as she is wont to do around this mess of a human being. “No, I can’t say I have.”

“You’re super smart, you’re no-nonsense, you always wear sensible footwear. How do you feel about breaking into university property after dark?”

“Not fantastic, actually.”

“No big deal, you’ll warm up to it. I can tell that you care about the truth, and that’s my whole bag. I want to expose the truth once and for all.” Mulder is looking increasingly excited, which is far too alarming for Scully’s taste. “What would you say if I told you that our university is part of a massive conspiracy to allow aliens to gain control of our government and species?”

Scully folds her arms across the chest of her leather jacket. “I’d say that you’re going to waste my time and my tuition money if you keep this up.”

“I accept your skepticism, your skepticism is healthy. Just give me a chance, okay? I’ve made like five zines on the topic, I know what I’m talking about.”

There’s really nothing to do at this point but sigh heavily.

“Did you hear me, Scully? _Zines_ , I’ve made zines.”

 

 

 

 

And that is how it begins with the two of them. That, and Mulder does end up lending her a whopping pile of zines, some of which appear to have encountered fire or boast errant coffee rings.

Mulder tells Scully that she believes in aliens. Scully tells Mulder that the probability of alien lifeforms visiting our planet is relatively slim. Mulder tells Scully that probability is for nerds. Scully pretends that Blevins hasn’t personally advised Scully to “please keep Miss Mulder on some sort of track, for her best interest and for the interest of the school, which she might burn down on accident.”

 

 

 

 

Possibly the worst mistake Scully makes is letting Mulder have her number. Not because Mulder ends up hitting on her or sexting her or sending her the occasional nude, not that this was a possibility Scully had turned over on a number of otherwise boring evenings or anything, but because Mulder sends her the most ridiculous messages ever.

And keeps sending them, and doesn’t stop sending them, even when Scully forces herself not to respond.

_SCULLY IT’S ME how many lake monsters can you name HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED THERE IS AN EVEN NUMBER OF THEM there is something to this SCULLY_

_SCULLY IT’S ME i am almost positive that my economics professor is wearing some sort of flesh mask!!! need you to confirm_

_SCULLY IT’S ME what are your feelings on demonology_

_SCULLY IT’S ME i believe i have just witnessed a glitch in the matrix, this girl just walked into my class TWICE! TWICE, SCULLY_

_SCULLY IT’S ME did you get the message about the matrix PLEASE SEND ME YOUR THOUGHTS SCULLY this is VERY IMPORTANT_

“Why didn’t you respond to my text?” Mulder will ask when they’re sitting in the most poorly lit part of the library basement -- Mulder insists that darkness uncrowds the mind -- or nursing discount beers at the shitty bar that Mulder believes is a front for a menacing inhuman force.

Scully will always shrug, not missing a beat.

“There’s something wrong with my phone, I guess. Dunno.”

“The unsolved mystery to end all other unsolved mysteries, Scully.”

 

 

 

 

Mulder claims that Scully has no friends. Scully says that Mulder doesn’t have any friends either, so Mulder drags her to the dilapidated shithole that houses the university radio station and introduces her to three guys attempting to build a receiver out of beer cans. The weirdest part is not even that they’re onto something there.

“We’re going underground,” they announce, and the one in the Slayer t-shirt with the unwashed metal hair gives Scully a thumbs-up. She pretends like she doesn’t hear them all taking turns telling Mulder how the science girl is way too hot for her.

 

 

 

 

“I’m crashing Krycek’s stupid frat party. You wanna come?”

Mulder is standing in Scully’s door with a half-empty bottle of bottom shelf tequila, bright red swim shorts, and a crewneck FBI sweatshirt dredged up, no doubt, from some forgotten thrift store in the Maryland suburbs. Scully puts down her textbook, raises an eyebrow.

“I’m busy.”

“It’s Friday night.”

She sighs, takes off her glasses. It’s typical, despite Mulder somehow always venturing far, far from the typical in Scully’s experience. “That doesn’t make me less busy.”

Mulder takes this opportunity to wave the bottle of tequila dramatically as a way of emphasizing her points. “Fraternities are inherently misogynist and full of raging jock dickholes. Crashing this party goes hand in hand with your personal value system, Scully.”

Scully will not go to this party, like any number of parties Scully doesn’t go to, but she’ll still open the door to Mulder at 3 am, post-mission of destroying fraternities forever, post-mission failure. Mulder will do what she always does, and lean against the door frame, fingers running a drunken path through her hair, falling onto Scully’s shoulders like the most predictable kind of rain. She will probably mention something about demonic possession or alien fetal harvest. And then she’ll fall asleep on Scully’s bed while Scully finishes typing up her paper.

Sometimes Scully tucks her in. Sometimes she slips under the sheets while Mulder sleeps on top of the duvet.

 

 

 

 

“You’d tell me if I was cockblocking, right?” This from Mulder as they walk to Saturday morning breakfast, Mulder’s hands in her pockets, Scully playing with the zipper of her jacket. She’s overly aware of what their hands do lately.

“Mulder, seriously.”

“Hey, I’m not gonna stand in the way of you getting yours.”

“I get mine,” Scully says, and it’s somewhat true.

“I’m just telling you to go ahead and tell me to scram if you want me to scram. Like last night, if you wanted me to scram, you gotta tell me. Scram, Mulder! Like that.”

“I don’t want you to scram. _Currently_ ,” she adds.

“If that changes, you’ll let me know?”

“Sure.” And she smiles, because she’s noticed how many times the other girl asks if it’s okay, if she can stay, if Scully is sick of her yet. Scully wonders how many times someone has to be kicked out before they start every sentence with the expectation of being abandoned halfway through.

 

 

 

 

“I’m switching to a psychology major,” Mulder announces, and then collapses onto the couch. She’s gotten into this habit of putting her feet across Scully, even though Scully continues to gingerly prod them off her lap and onto the floor. “Skinner is pissed, surprise. I’m like, hey dude, you’re my advisor, lay the advising on me. And then he cuts into me about how I’m aimless and underperforming and Dean Spender gave me that special scholarship and wouldn’t my dad be so disappointed, etcetera etcetera.”

“He does have a point. When was the last time you handed in a paper?”

“Scully, do you really think that a paper on the importance of sample size is more important than containing predatory cryptids?”

“That wasn’t the chupacabra, Mulder. It was a guy in a gorilla suit. And you didn’t contain him, you just threw a giant net over him and yelled ‘We’re making history’ until he took off his mask and walked away.”

“Poor example. How about those orbs we got on tape? That’s irrefutable proof.”

“Mulder, you’re failing anatomy.”

“The anatomy of earthly beings, maybe. But who knows, say I perform the first alien autopsy--”

“Mulder,” Scully says, and it’s the kind of moment where she figures that she could probably shut her up with a well-intended kiss. But she doesn’t, because that’s complicated. Not that Mulder isn’t complicated in her thrift store sweatshirts and her partially-hidden Bigfoot tattoo and the way Scully’s head fits perfectly under her chin when she goes in for a drunken hug. It’s more that the kind of complicated Mulder is has grown on Scully over the past two years, and the kind of complicated that a kiss would be might take another kind of growing altogether.

 

 

 

 

About those drunken hugs: Mulder is a touchy-feely drunk. She’s also a philosophizing drunk who wants Scully to stargaze on the roof with her, and talk about the possibility of ancient alien civilizations with her, and sometimes hold hands with her. Sometimes.

Mulder is weird about the holding hands part, weirder than her normal levels of weird.

“Do you believe in reincarnation, Scully?”

And Scully knows that Mulder has seen the crucifix she wears, and if they haven’t talked about religion it’s because Mulder hasn’t gone there. Mulder has gone just about everywhere else -- she knows that Scully prefers wearing boy briefs to thongs, because this is information that came up for absolutely no reason -- so there must be something to it, something like respect.

“No, Mulder. I do not believe in reincarnation.”

“I just wonder if we’re all living the same lives over and over again, and maybe we’re meeting the same people in those lives, maybe we’re repeating the same people and the same mistakes and the same feelings every time. A big cosmic carousel.”

Scully goes to chapel sometimes. She thinks that Mulder has yet to find out, but she can’t be sure. There’d probably be some stupid argument about how going to chapel isn’t part of Scully’s personal brand of punk, and when is Scully going to stop pretending to be such a good girl and live her own life for once. And then Mulder would get flustered and apologize, and Scully would roll her eyes and tell her that it’s fine, it’s fine, until Mulder stalks off and Scully pulls her sweater tighter around her shoulders, like it’s cold when it’s not. It never seems to get that cold in Virginia.

“It’s kind of far-fetched.”

Mulder shrugs, one of her big heaving shrugs that involve simultaneously pushing her frames up her nose. “Maybe we were always supposed to be class partners, Scully, and we’re meant for some great and important destiny. And maybe we’ll die someday in the process of saving the world, and repeat that same quest over and over again. Isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that the most beautiful thing you’ve ever considered?”

“Mulder, are you stoned?”

“Oh, totally. Baked as a fucking plate of cookies.”

Scully holds up her fingers and keeps them there until Mulder pulls out the pinched stub of a joint from her pocket, solemnly lighting it and handing it over.

“Are all pre-med students as down as you?”

Scully exhales, pushing the smoke out through her teeth. “Why, you trying to get lucky?”

“Now that I think of it, there’s a real cute brunette in the chemistry department who seems to give me these looks, and I’m not saying that there’s anything there, but--”

“I will not set you up with her, no.”

“That’s rather ungenerous of you, Scully.”

“I don’t do that kind of thing. As a principle. It feels...presumptuous.”

“Not even for your very best gal pal? Come on, Scully. There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Scully snorts, takes the last hit from the stub before putting it out. “I can’t believe you’re quoting Madeleine Albright at me just so I’ll be your wingman.”

“I’d quote Bugs Bunny if it would get me a date with this chemistry girl. Diana, maybe? Yeah, Diana could be into this. I’ve been told I’m pretty darn smooth.”

Scully tries very hard not to roll her eyes.

 

 

 

 

“Why don’t you have friends? I mean, you’re really smart, you have good taste in music. You’re a cool lady. You’re not weird or anything. You should have an eager line of friendships just chompin’ at the bit.” Mulder has traced Scully to her favorite laboratory, despite Scully never having given her the directions. “Unless,” and here, Mulder points a chewed stump of a pencil at Scully for emphasis. “Maybe you think being a loner is better for your image.”

"One could say there are merits to being undisturbed.” Scully uses this opportunity to give Mulder a meaningful look, though it must be completely lost on her because she closes the gap between them, continuing her ever-constant war on Scully’s personal space. Mulder has a toothpick hanging out the side of her mouth. She always seems to be _gnawing_ on something and for some inhuman reason, it manages to make her attractive. Somehow. Scully has chosen to not spend much time thinking about how or why this works.

“Do I disturb you, Scully?”

Scully shoots Mulder a look over her shoulder, but since it’s the end of their junior year and they’re this close to finals and she’s really, _really_ used to her shit by now, she just smiles and narrows her eyes. “Maybe.”

 

 

 

 

Her father dies. Scully deals with it the same way she’s dealt with most things, insisting that she won’t take a semester off, insisting that she can keep up her classes, her grades, her required lab time. Mulder keeps showing up at her dorm with food, sliding things under her door like some sort of pet. Scully wakes up to burnt DVDs of campy sci-fi movies from the sixties, candy bars and blank postcards and lotto tickets on her floor in shiny little piles.

“You’re like a magpie,” Scully tells Mulder when she finally opens the door, stares up at the taller girl in her sweater with the hole over the pocket.

“I was thinking about you,” Mulder says, rubs the back of her neck and shifts in her shoes and blushes right there, right in front of Scully. “I brought you the stuff I saw when I was thinking about you.”

“You were thinking about me when you saw a lotto ticket?”

“I don’t know,” Mulder says, finally making eye contact. “I was thinking about you a lot.”

And Scully wraps her arms around Mulder’s middle, pulls her as close to her as possible. Pulls her closer than the hugs she exchanged at the side of her father’s grave, even closer than her mother when they cried in the kitchen, when she insisted on cooking for the wake and ended up with her head down on the table.

“Thank you,” she whispers, and Mulder kisses her on top of her head. Scully tips up her chin, and Mulder kisses her on the forehead. Scully gets onto her tiptoes, and Mulder kisses her on the mouth, just once, quickly.

“I--I’m sorry,” Mulder says, biting down on her lip, but Scully shakes her head, pulls her into a hug again.

“It’s okay,” Scully whispers into Mulder’s shirt, warm and familiar. “Don’t apologize.”

“I just want you to feel--”

“I do,” Scully says. “With you, I do.”

 

 

 

 

Mulder gets a car on campus their junior year, and the extent of their ghost hunting, entity chasing, monster wrangling, etcetera now extends to a wider radius. Mulder makes a mixtape, derives a lot of pride from the fact the SAAB wagon still _takes_ cassette tapes.

By this point, Diana is in the picture. Scully has chosen not to have any feelings about this, and really, if you asked, she does not. Who cares if Mulder is now dating Diana, or whatever it is they want to call it, maybe dating is too formal and Mulder would be just the person to not want to put _labels_ on it, Mulder always being so frustratringly--

Scully doesn’t have any feelings about this, anyway.

What happens as a result of Diana being in the picture and Mulder having a car is that Diana now tags along occasionally. She’s supportive of Mulder’s theories, almost too supportive, showing up to Mulder’s carrel with a pile of books on abduction and cryptids, enthusiastically slapping Roswell bumper stickers on things. She’s smart and pretty and everyone in their class seems to know her and like her, unlike the social fringe that Scully and Mulder occupy. Diana wears expensive sweaters and on-trend shoes. She gets her hair done every two weeks, and still makes out with Mulder even when the girl has been talking about conspiracies for an hour. Scully silently admits that she is probably perfect and Scully chooses not to have feelings about this, _again_.

Diana, though, rides in the back. Scully rides in the passenger seat. This is an unspoken rule that Mulder addresses only once, when Diana first attempts to get into the front.

“That’s Scully’s seat,” Mulder says, matter-of-factly.

Scully stares between the two of them - Diana blinking at Mulder, Mulder stepping into the driver seat unfazed.

Diana keeps looking at Scully in the rearview mirror, and Scully keeps looking away, biting her lip.

 

 

 

 

“Was that your dad?” Mulder’s shoving her phone back in her pocket - an old model iPhone, covered in an impossible amount of cracks, partially waterlogged. She shrugs, avoids Scully’s eye. Avoids it in a way that Scully can’t help but notice, not that anything gets past her these days when it comes to Fox Mulder and the tiny subtleties of Fox Mulder’s anything-but-subtleties.

“Yeah,” Mulder says. “Fuck him, though.”

It does not escape Scully that Mulder sniffs loudly and uses the excuse of flipping her bangs to wipe her eyes. “Mulder.” And when this doesn’t get a response: “Fox.”

Mulder looks at her, looks her dead in the eye and Scully really wishes that one look from this girl didn’t make her feel like she is responsible for remaking the entire world in this 21 year old’s image.

“Fox, you don’t need to be anyone but who you are.”

Fox laughs, the saddest laugh Scully’s ever heard. “It’d be nice to know who I am, though, right?”

“I know who you are,” she says, and gets on her tiptoes to kiss Mulder on the cheek.

Because for all her ill-fitting sweaters and slightly crooked glasses and Leonardo diCaprio’s haircut from 1996, Mulder is still Mulder. Mulder is the girl who told Scully after only two weeks of knowing her that she trusted her. She trusted her enough to say that she still wasn’t over the disappearance of her sister, and she was afraid she might never be. Mulder is the girl who talked Scully through the death of her father in their junior year. Mulder is the one who thinks that we need to track Bigfoot because Bigfoot is beautiful, because all things that are wild and untameable and unknowable are beautiful by virtue of their mystery, and Mulder wants one thing above all: to know that beauty.

 

 

 

 

Scully sits with Mulder and Diana at dinner. Mulder keeps stealing carrot sticks off Scully’s salad.

“You have _fries_ ,” Scully says, shielding her plate. “Don’t steal food if you’re moving up a level in the food pyramid.”

“Dearest Scully,” Mulder gnaws on the carrot as smugly as one can gnaw on a carrot. “The food pyramid was invented by ex-Nazi scientists promoting the diet of a hybrid alien-human superior race.”

Scully rolls her eyes. “You are so full of shit,” she says, and when she goes back to eating, she catches the way Diana is looking at her, the way she glances quickly between Mulder and Scully, the tiniest of frowns, and then looks back at her food.

 

 

 

 

Scully goes home on her breaks. Mulder usually doesn’t, but when she does, there’s a lot of phonecalls at 2 in the morning, Scully in some hideous pink bathrobe on her childhood bed, listening to Mulder talk about whatever theory is currently occupying her time.

“I’m just saying, there are things about the spread of ebola that they’re not telling us--”

“Mulder, you know that’s ridiculous.”

“Did I tell you about the shadow organization collecting blood samples in East Africa, Scully?”

“Yes, you did.” Scully sighs. “I really need to go to bed, Mulder. So do you. Didn’t you say your mother is having a dinner party tomorrow?”

“That’s not important. Debunking a global conspiracy is important.”

“Go to bed, Mulder.”

“Fine. Dream of me, Scully. Dream dirty, dirty dreams of me.”

“Speak for yourself, Mulder.”

She smiles to herself before hanging up.

 

 

 

 

They’re crouched in a swamp, flashlights in hand, when Mulder lets out a huge sigh and turns to Scully.

“I broke up with Diana,” she says, as if a few seconds ago they weren’t talking about how much further they’d have to hike through soggy ground to find this marsh ape Mulder is so focused on lately.

“Wow,” Scully says, swats at a mosquito. “Is this what the marsh ape is about?”

“Ugh, _yes_ ,” Mulder moans. “And no. Christ, Scully, I don’t know. I needed something to distract myself. I know this is probably the weakest lead we’ve had in a while--”

“A drunk man thought he might have seen a dark shape moving through the swamp, and he thought maybe it also had a banana.”

Mulder winces. “Right, yeah. Not the strongest case. But still worth checking out, of course.”

Scully smacks yet another mosquito in this sea of mosquitoes. “Sure.”

And later, when Mulder is sitting in her trunks on the edge of Scully’s bed while Scully uses a bag of salt and tweezers to pull leeches off her calves: “Do you want to talk about it?”

Mulder shrugs. “About what? About not finding the marsh ape? I’m sure it was remaining out of sight due to current mating cycles or--”

“Mulder,” Scully rolls her eyes. “Your breakup.”

“Oh,” and Mulder shrugs again, this time with much less enthusiasm. She bites her lip as Scully pulls on a particularly stubborn leech. “We had different priorities, I guess. She wanted me to put her first, and she said I wasn’t doing that. I was putting, um...the work first.”

“Everyone wants to be put first, Mulder.” Scully finally gets the thing off, throws it into the bucket of water. Mulder has insisted they save them and attempt to grow them as some form of anti-extraterrestrial biological weapon. “That’s what you do in a relationship, you try to put the other person first.”

“I didn’t realize you were using that pre-med degree for marriage counseling, Scully.”

Scully brushes a salty thumb over one of Mulder’s leech bites. “Oh, were you _married_? I wasn’t aware.”

“You know what I mean,” Mulder says, wincing as the last leech comes off. “I know I wasn’t the world’s best girlfriend, or whatever. I just knew she wasn’t the right person anymore. I have to be with someone who supports my quest, you know?”

“She did support you. Way more than I’d expected, to be perfectly honest.”

“Fuck, Scully, whose side are you on?” Mulder gets to her feet, running a hand through her hair like she does whenever she’s frustrated. “I get it, okay? I’m going back to my dorm.”

She goes for the door, huffing. Scully raises an eyebrow.

“Mulder,” she says, calming dropping the leech into the bucket. “You’re not wearing any pants.”

“Right, _well_ , that’s my choice. Just like this relationship, or, you know, whatever relationship I choose. It’s my choice.”

Thus it is that Fox Mulder, wearing nothing but a sweatshirt, a pair of trunks, and a slew of faintly bleeding welts where leeches had previously resided, strides off into the night.

 

 

 

 

And Scully is aware that Mulder dating Diana was a kind of way of not having to answer a question she did not want to ask, and she is choosing not to have any feelings about that.

 

 

 

 

“That was _without question_ an apparition.”

“It was fog, Mulder.”

“Does fog speak, Scully? Does fog pass on the untimely messages of its doomed existence? No, I think _not_.”

“I didn’t hear any untimely messages.” Scully brushes the dust from her pants, having made the mistake of wearing all-black to a seance in an abandoned mansion a few miles off-campus.

“We’ll see what the tape recorder has to say about that,” Mulder says, packing away her recording equipment with a certain level of defensiveness. “Honestly, Scully. It’s like you choose to completely ignore what’s right in front of you.”

“There was nothing in front of us! There was a complex atmospheric phenomenon created by cloud water droplets. It did not give us a message. It did not rise from the realm of the undead.” And she doesn’t really know why she’s so irritated by this, an evening with Mulder that is practically mundane in comparison to the other near-death experiences she has been dragged through as of late, but something inside of her cracks. Snaps like a twig. She’s furious at Mulder for no reason she can possibly name, and stalks outside.

On the porch of this crumbling Victorian mansion, Mulder touches her arm. “I’m sorry,” Mulder says. “I like that you’re a skeptic. You know that I like that about you.”

“It’s fine,” Scully says, although it’s not, and she doesn’t know why.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, Mulder.”

“You know I can tell when you’re lying, right?”

Scully sighs. “It’s nothing, really.”

And then there’s a hand on her cheek, a thumb tracing the line of her jaw. “Listen, Scully--”

“What are you doing?” Because Mulder, who has hugged and leaned and grabbed her shoulder in fits of enthusiasm has never actually held Scully’s face before. There are all kinds of ways she’s never touched Scully before, ways they both are acutely aware of, Scully would imagine, from the way Mulder is breathing harder, and Scully is frozen is place, and she is choosing not to have feelings about that but her body is openly rejecting that choice, these aches and needs are spilling out of her wrists and her ankles and her mouth, her mouth-- Mulder’s nose is just about touching hers.

“There’s something I’ve wanted to --”

“Mulder, do not try to kiss me right now.”

“What?” Mulder’s brow furrows. “Wait, _what_?”

“Were you about to kiss me?”

Mulder, whose hand is still cupping Scully’s cheek, continues to furrow that very furrowable brow. “And what if I was?”

“Well, you can’t. We can’t. That’s not...it’s just something we can’t do. It’s obvious, Mulder. It’s simple.”

“Really? Explain it, then. If it’s so obvious, tell me why we can’t kiss.”

Scully pretends not to be so flustered, but is sure she’s failing. “Because.”

“Because why? Spell it out, Scully.”

“Why do you always do this?” “

Do what?”

“Insist on having to pick every single tiny mysterious thing apart. I swear to god, if I was a panel of one million buttons, you would still manage to push every single one. You would dedicate your life to the act of pushing every single one of my buttons.”

“That’s...that’s a weird metaphor, Scully.”

“I don’t care. You’re not kissing me. You’re not supposed to kiss me.”

“Do you want me to kiss you?”

“Does that really matter?”

“Of course it matters! If you don’t want me to kiss you, of course I won’t kiss you. But if this is just you trying to stick to some silent rule you came up with ages ago--”

“I’m trying to protect you.”

“From what? Is there some sort of parasitic alien living in your larynx that’s going to crawl out and inject its eggs in me if we kiss?”

“Only you would derail this argument with a parasitic alien’s ovipositor.”

“The fact that you think you need to _protect_ me from--”

“Mulder, you need me.” And suddenly it’s all so real, that they’re standing on the porch of a decrepit Victorian mansion, that the wind is singing strange songs and the moon is eerily lighting everything and Scully does not believe in ghosts except for when she does, except for when she believes in Mulder, which is all of the time.

Mulder blinks. “What?”

“You need me. You need _this_ , what we have, this friendship. Partnership. Whatever it is. I am your constant. If that shifts, if we...change, I don’t know if I can always be here for you in the way I am now.”

Mulder’s hand drops, and she takes a step back, the boards of the house creaking under her. “I don’t need you.”

“Well, maybe _I_ need this, then. Maybe I know that it’s easier to always be on the cusp of something with you than it is to be that something. Maybe I don’t want to risk ruining the something.”

“Maybe we could do the...the something, and it would still be fine. We could make the something work.”

“Even from a purely statistical perspective, Mulder, the odds are not good.”

“I hate statistics,” Mulder says, stomping down the porch. She’s already starting back for the road when Scully sighs and follows. As she always does. As she knew she would. As she might be doing forever.

 

 

 

 

“I’m sorry,” Mulder says, sitting in the car next to Scully’s hall. It’s been a silent ride, the worst kind of ride with Mulder, because the girl tends to express herself by being enraptured or outraged by government cover-ups and her hunch that there is an amorphous entity living in a crypt under the main gymnasium. It’s late, well past midnight now, and Scully doesn’t want to leave the car until they’ve spoken, until she feels like they’re on solid ground again.

“It’s fine,” Scully says. “I’m sorry, too.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” Mulder still has the car running, the heat’s on and the radio’s playing almost too softly too hear. “You were right, you know. About me needing this. Sometimes I feel like...I don’t know, like my life is impossible without you.”

“I care about you, Mulder.” She sighs. “Maybe I care too much.”

“I know,” Mulder says. “It doesn’t make me want to kiss you any less, though. Just for the record.”

“Trust me, I get it,” Scully says, and finally looks at Mulder, looks at the girl she’s spent at least a few...okay, if she’s been honest, a decent amount of nights thinking about, and she knows that it’s just a scientific fact that if you spend enough time with a person, the body naturally assumes some type of intimacy, the mind naturally places that person in dreams of multiple natures.

She knows that. And yet...

“Shit,” Scully says, just under her breath, and then leans forward to pull the collar of Mulder’s shirt and kiss her hard.

 

 

 

 

Mulder’s... _good_. Sloppy, almost giddy in the way she’s currently cupping Scully’s ass and sucking her neck, but so good. She puts the seat back all the way and Scully climbs on top of her, very aware that this is the first time she has ever so much as made out in a car, like a couple of teenagers hiding from their parents. And maybe there is a part of this that feels like they’re getting away with something, like someone could say they shouldn’t be up to this right now and they’d flip them off, roll up the window. But then things get serious, just for a moment, when Mulder’s hand is in place and Scully is shifting to accomodate her.

“Wait,” Mulder says, and Scully looks down at her, freezes, thinking she’s done something wrong.

“What?” Scully whispers.

“It’s just...” Mulder’s biting down on her bottom lip. “You’re so _tiny_. I don’t want to hurt you.”

And Scully smiles at that, leans forward to kiss her on the cheek. “You won’t.”

 

 

 

 

“I made a mixtape for that, you know. I’m bummed I didn’t have it in the car.” Scully raises an eyebrow, wiping down the steamed windows and looking for her bra.

“You made a _mixtape_ for us having sex? When did you make that?”

Mulder is bright red, though it’s unclear if it is flushed from sex or flushed from embarrassment. “I don’t know, whatever. Like...sophomore year or something, don’t worry about it.”

Scully grins over at her, buttoning up her shirt. “Sophomore year, _really_. What was on it?”

“Classics. Ginuwine, some Marvin Gaye, Al Green. Otis Redding’s ‘Try A Little Tenderness’. Old school baby-making songs.”

She snorts. “I’m afraid we aren’t going to be making any babies this way, Mulder.”

“Well, if human technology catches up with alien technology, maybe. I mean, there’s hybrid fetal implants happening all the time and we’re just--”

Scully kisses her before that tirade gets out of hand.

 

 

 

 

Mulder wants to plan a road trip for after graduation, before Scully starts her internship and Mulder decides what she’s doing with her life. She picks out destinations and changes them daily, sending Scully varying articles on obscure North American supernatural sightings followed up with texts demanding her opinion.

“Apparently there’s a humanoid-sized parasite in the sewers of Newark, Scully. That’s our kind of thing.”

Scully, holed up in the library for finals, only nods over her textbook. “That’s great, Mulder.”

“They’re finding flukeworms, Scully. In _people_ , Scully.”

“In many parts of the world, it’s not uncommon to see human infections of the genus Schistosoma, Mulder. It’s called schistosomiasis.”

Mulder grins, feet up on the seat next to her. “Say that again, Scully.”

Scully looks up from her book, taking off her glasses and sighing. “Schistosomiasis.”

“Damn, girl.” Mulder fans herself. “I love the way you talk about parasitic infections.”

Scully has to roll her eyes, but she’ll still let Mulder come over and kiss her just under her ear, nipping the skin there and making what she calls ‘Flukeman’ noises.

 

 

 

 

Scully drowns in her graduation cap and gown. Mulder’s is too short, comes to her calves and reveals her wrinkled khakis and scuffed shoes. When they stand next to each other, they look like a punchline.

The Mulder family maintains its distance, always stands a foot apart as if to emphasize their fractures. Mulder is quiet in the shadow of her father, only blinks when photos are taken with “Felicity.” She calls him Sir and stiffens against any and all hugs. Scully watches from the periphery, secure in the crinkling warmth of her own family, doling out their own barrage of embraces and cameras.

Midnight finds them on the roof of Scully’s dorm, beers in hand. Scully rolls a spliff, something she has not shared with Mulder since their freshman year. She’s been careful to keep certain methods for loosening up close to the belt around her lately.

“You know,” Mulder says, taking a swig. “It hasn’t been a bad run overall.”

“That’s reductive, Mulder.”

“I am the tragic hero of my own narrative, Scully.”

Scully snorts, but it’s not like she hasn’t had four years of this kind of overly dramatic declaration. She passes the spliff. “Want to hear something interesting?”

“Is it a joke about you being summa cum laude?”

“Someone said they saw a ghost in Parking Garage C.”

Mulder grins. “Surely you don’t believe everything you hear, Scully.”

Scully takes the spliff back, inhales calmly. “Not without a thorough investigation.” “

Has someone called the Ghostbusters?”

“No need to get contractors when you have an on-campus team.”

“Truer words have never been spoken, Scully.”

 

 

 

 


End file.
